Don't blame addicts for America's opioid crisis. Here are the real culprits

America’s opioid crisis was caused by rapacious pharma companies, politicians who colluded with them and regulators who approved one opioid pill after another

Chris McGreal in The Guardian



‘Opioids killed more than 33,000 Americans in 2015 and the toll was almost certainly higher last year.’

Of all the people Donald Trump could blame for the opioid epidemic, he chose the victims. After his own commission on the opioid crisis issued an interim report this week, Trump said young people should be told drugs are “No good, really bad for you in every way.”

The president’s exhortation to follow Nancy Reagan’s miserably inadequate advice and Just Say No to drugs is far from useful. The then first lady made not a jot of difference to the crack epidemic in the 1980s. But Trump’s characterisation of the source of the opioid crisis was more disturbing. “The best way to prevent drug addiction and overdose is to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first place,” he said.

That is straight out of the opioid manufacturers’ playbook. Facing a raft of lawsuits and a threat to their profits, pharmaceutical companies are pushing the line that the epidemic stems not from the wholesale prescribing of powerful painkillers - essentially heroin in pill form - but their misuse by some of those who then become addicted.


The amount of opioids prescribed in the US was enough for every American to be medicated 24/7 for three weeks”

In court filings, drug companies are smearing the estimated two million people hooked on their products as criminals to blame for their own addiction. Some of those in its grip break the law by buying drugs on the black market or switch to heroin. But too often that addiction began by following the advice of a doctor who, in turn, was following the drug manufacturers instructions.

Trump made no mention of this or reining in the mass prescribing underpinning the epidemic. Instead he played to the abuse narrative when he painted the crisis as a law and order issue, and criticised Barack Obama for scaling back drug prosecutions and lowering sentences.

But as the president’s own commission noted, this is not an epidemic caused by those caught in its grasp. “We have an enormous problem that is often not beginning on street corners; it is starting in doctor’s offices and hospitals in every state in our nation,” it said.

 ‘This is an almost uniquely American crisis.’

Opioids killed more than 33,000 Americans in 2015 and the toll was almost certainly higher last year. About half of deaths involved prescription painkillers. Most of those who overdose on heroin or a synthetic opiate, such as fentanyl, first become hooked on legal pills. 

This is an almost uniquely American crisis driven in good part by particular American issues from the influence of drug companies over medical policy to a “pill for every ill” culture. Trump’s commission, which called the opioid epidemic “unparalleled”, said the grim reality is that “the amount of opioids prescribed in the US was enough for every American to be medicated around the clock for three weeks”.

The US consumes more than 80% of the global opioid pill production even though it has less than 5% of the world’s population. Over the past 20 years, one federal institution after another lined up behind the drug manufacturers’ false claims of an epidemic of untreated pain in the US. They seem not to have asked why no other country was apparently suffering from such an epidemic or plying opioids to its patients at every opportunity.

With the pharmaceutical lobby’s money keeping Congress on its side, regulations were rewritten to permit physicians to prescribe as many pills as they wanted without censure. Indeed, doctors sometimes found themselves hauled before ethics boards for not supplying enough.


It’s an epidemic because we have a business model for it. Follow the money


Unlike most other countries, the US health system is run as an industry not a service. That gives considerable power to drug manufacturers, medical providers and health insurance companies to influence policy and practices.

Too often, their bottom line is profits not health. Opioid pills are far cheaper and easier than providing other forms of treatment for pain, like physical therapy or psychiatry. As Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia told the Guardian last year: “It’s an epidemic because we have a business model for it. Follow the money. Look at the amount of pills they shipped in to certain parts of our state. It was a business model.”

But the system also gives a lot of power to patients. People coughing up large amounts of money in insurance premiums and co-pays expect results. They are, after all, more customer than patient. Doctors complain of patients who arrive expecting a pill to resolve medical conditions without taking responsibility for their own health by eating better or exercising more.

In particular, the idea has taken hold, pushed by the pharmaceutical industry, that there is a right to be pain free. Other countries pursue strategies to reduce and manage pain, not raise expectations that it can simply be made to disappear. In all of this, regulators became facilitators. The Food and Drug Administration approved one opioid pill after another.


The Food and Drug Administration approved one opioid pill after another.


As late as 2013, by which time the scale of the epidemic was clear, the FDA permitted a powerful opiate, Zohydro, onto the market over the near unanimous objection of its own review committee. It was clear from the hearing that doctors understood the dangers, but the agency appeared to have put commercial considerations first.

US states long ago woke up to the crisis as morgues filled, social services struggled to cope with children orphaned or taken into care, and the epidemic took an economic toll. Police chiefs and local politicians said it was a social crisis not a law and order problem.

Some state legislatures began to curb mass prescribing. All the while they looked to Washington for leadership. They did not get much from Obama or Congress, although legislation approving $1bn on addiction treatment did pass last year. Instead, it was up to pockets of sanity to push back.

Last year, the then director of the Centers for Disease Control, Tom Frieden, made his mark with guidelines urging doctors not to prescribe opioids as a first step for chronic or routine pain, although even that got political pushback in Congress where the power of the pharmaceutical lobby is not greatly diminished.

There are also signs of a shift in the FDA after it pressured a manufacturer into withdrawing an opioid drug, Opana, that should never have been on sale in the first place. It was initially withdrawn in the 1970s, but the FDA permitted it back on to the market in 2006 after the rules for testing drugs were changed. At the time, many accused the pharmaceutical companies of paying to have them rewritten.

Trump’s opioid commission offered hope that the epidemic would finally get the attention it needs. It made a series of sensible if limited recommendations: more mental health treatment people with a substance abuse disorder and more effective forms of rehab.

Trump finally got around to saying that the epidemic is a national emergency on Thursday after he was criticised for ignoring his own commission’s recommendation to do so. But he reinforced the idea that the victims are to blame with an offhand reference to LSD.

Real leadership is still absent – and that won’t displease the pharmaceutical companies at all.

London School of Economics - Shame on you

Owen Jones in The Guardian

It is a university that prides itself on being a forum for debate about social injustice and inequality. The London School of Economics was founded by Fabian socialists at the end of the 19th century: they believed education was key to liberating society from social ills.

Last week I was due to attend a debate at the LSE on the expansion of secondary moderns (which is what selection in education really means). At the request of cleaners on strike over their terms and conditions, I withdrew at the last minute. And here is the perverse truth: well-paid speakers will turn up at this prestigious institution to debate the great injustices of modern Britain. Then in come the cleaners – all from migrant or minority backgrounds – to clear up, victims of some of the very injustices that have just been debated.

Like most universities, LSE outsourced its cleaners years ago. It’s cheaper, you see, because the cleaners can then be employed with worse terms and conditions than in-house staff. In this way a university with a multimillion-pound budget can deviously save money on those who clean the libraries, the lecture halls, the offices.

An in-house LSE worker has up to 41 days’ paid leave, six months’ fully paid sick pay, and good maternity pay and pension rights. Cleaners, on the other hand, have the statutory minimum. If they fall ill, they are paid nothing for the first three days, then just £17.87 a day. For a cleaner paid £9.75 an hour – living in one of the world’s most expensive cities – that’s simply not an option. “They can’t afford to be sick,” says Petros Elia, general secretary of the United Voices of the World (UVW) union. Cleaners turn up ill to work instead.

No wonder they describe themselves as “second-class”, “third-class”, or “no-class” workers. The response of LSE’s management is a sobering indictment of industrial relations in a society in which the employers have the whip hand. Cleaners and their supporters have been threatened with arrests and injunctions. “LSE’s mottos is ‘to know the causes of things’,” says Michael Etheridge, the Unison branch secretary, “and yet on the issue of outsourcing it has, as an institution, been wholly ignorant.”

That these cleaners have stood up for themselves – in the face of such hostility – is courageous, and an inspiring precedent for other workers in low-paid, insecure Britain. They’ve come from a variety of different countries; some have only worked at LSE for a few months. But they have organised, and thrown themselves into a determined struggle that now has the university authorities on the run.

Rattled, the LSE has been forced to offer concessions: beginning with 10 days’ full sick pay, then 15, then 20. But UVW and Unison – which represents some of the other cleaners – are clear. This is not a strike simply about improved conditions: it is about being treated the same as other workers. Only parity will do. Unison has been offered a package of improvements, including sick pay of up to 65 days and four weeks of additional maternity pay, and a pledge to work “to reach full parity … in the near future”. But continued pressure on LSE to accept the cleaners’ demands is clearly necessary.

It is a saga that tells many stories about modern Britain. It’s about how, disproportionately, some of the lowest paid and most insecure work is done by migrants and minorities. It’s about a race to the bottom in terms and conditions. It’s about how the law is rigged in favour of bosses. But it’s also about how – with determination and organisation – workers can indeed win.

Mildred Simpson was born in Jamaica and moved to Britain in 1989: she’s worked at the LSE for 16 years. A few years ago she was made a supervisor: back then, there were 25 supervisors, but the number has been slashed to 13. For no extra pay, she is expected to do the jobs of two people. This, for her, is a fight for equality. “We’re doing all the dirty work while they’re drinking their champagne and drinking their coffee,” she says. But she has a message to other workers too. “Fight as well as us as much as you can, for your rights, for pensions, for better working conditions, to be recognised.”

Britain’s universities grant their management lavish salaries: the Former LSE director Craig Calhoun was on a salary package of £381,000 a year and spent tens of thousands on overseas trips. It’s not just cleaners who are mistreated. Academia is becoming increasingly casualised and insecure. At Birmingham University, for instance, a shocking 70% of staff are on insecure contracts. Academics are overworked, struggling with bureaucracy, and often lacking the basic security of knowing how many hours they’re working each week.

Unions have been dramatically weakened in Britain. That has fed into a general sense that injustice is permanent, a fact of life like a weather system, rather than the consequence of human decisions. If there is no apparent collective means available to overcome injustice, then inevitably we become resigned. But if some marginalised, hitherto voiceless cleaners can put one of the world’s most prestigious universities on the backfoot, they set an example to others. This is a country that has endured the longest squeeze in wages for generations, while wealth at the top and in the boardroom has boomed; where our workforce is increasingly stripped of security and fundamental rights. That might be the current direction of travel, but it can be changed. And those cleaners at LSE show how.

How have the British Muslim men involved in the Rotherham child sex grooming gang been treating their own wives?

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent


The Pakistani Muslim men – three brothers and an uncle – who groomed, raped and destroyed young girls in Rotherham have been given long sentences. Two local white women have also been convicted of supplying girls to the men. The reactions to these verdicts are instructive. Racists are red with righteous rage; this is what happens, they say, when you let “coloureds” into the country. Many anti-racists, just as blindly furious, assert race and ethnicity have nothing to do with what happened. The white female procurers are their alibis. The rapists’ relatives and community leaders stand by their men. They believe the blokes took what was freely offered by trashy females – children, daughters. Muslims who condemn the exploitation, in their eyes, bring shame on the community. That’s how twisted their values are.

The one question nobody asks is how these men have been treating their sisters and wives. Most of them behave just as abominably and cruelly indoors as they do outside when they prey on young flesh. They want control; they abjure equality. Some – a small minority – do feel a kind of love for the women and girls in the family but many have monstrous views on sexual equality and feminine desire. Home is a cage in which no pleasures are permitted, where hopes and freedoms expire. Activists have sought to free these women for decades. The terrible truth is that as society becomes more permissive, the number of caged birds increases. One caveat: I am not saying all Muslim girls and women are oppressed. What I am saying is that sexual predators from traditional Pakistani families and many other minority communities think all women and girls are low-life. I was looking at my wedding pictures the other day. On a cold, snowy December day, in 2000, I married my English husband in Ealing Town Hall. On the steps we had photos taken. It was freezing cold but I was in a silk sari, as was my mum. My Asian friends in their finery were shivering and smiling happily. The most striking, gorgeous person in the crowd was Humera (not her real name), who had stayed with me several times over the previous two years. She was from a northern town and had escaped a forced marriage. Her family had made her marry a man from Pakistan who had then raped her nightly for months. A social worker helped her escape. I heard of her case and offered to have her live with us for a while. The bruises on her thighs and breasts took months to heal.

She was one of countless such victims, all hidden and hopeless. Forced marriage has since been outlawed and girls have some protection and awareness of their rights but now we have Sharia courts in this country, which condone wife beating, marital rape, compulsory or child marriages, polygamy, paternal ownership of children and extreme sexism. Pre-pubescent Muslim girls are married on Skype. Imams praise this technology, which allows families to trade in their daughters – girls between the ages of six and nine among them. How did our rulers let this happen?

Political scientist Elham Manea, herself a Muslim, has written a new book, Women and Shari’a Law: the Impact of Legal Pluralism in the UK. She investigated 80 faith “councils”, which settle disputes and make quasi-legal decisions. According to Manea these courts are more hardline even than in Pakistan and many of their religious leaders issue horrendous advice. For example, a senior cleric in a British Sharia council pronounced that there was no “right age” for a girl to marry: “As you know, the earlier the better”. Humera’s family were not given religious authorisation to do what they did to her. Imams in the 1990s were conservative but not inflexible Islamicists. Today the human-rights abuses are validated by dozens of Muslim leaders as well as by influential Islamic institutions. Though forced marriages are a curse in Hindu and Sikh families too, they do not have systemised, pervasive doctrines to back their heinous behaviours.

Why is this even important when we are discussing the Rochdale crimes against white British children? Am I trying to deflect attention from those horrors? On the contrary; I am making vital connections. We should find out how those close to the three brothers and the uncle were treated. Was terrible violence meted out to them, too? Should we not know that? More than 1,400 vulnerable white children were abused in Rotherham. Thousands of others are being discovered in other towns. The numbers would shoot up if we also counted the family victims of the groomers.

Grooming and domestic rape often go together. Police and journalists need to be as concerned about the latter as they now (thankfully) are about the former. Families and communities will resist such probes, lob accusations of racism and “insensitivity”. But it has to happen. Females of all backgrounds should be protected from sexual savagery and misogynist Sharia courts. There must be one law for all.

Don’t ignore the saner voices of moderate Muslims

SA Aiyar in The Times of India

There is much in common between those who hit Paris last week and Mumbai on 26/11. Let nobody pretend, like elements of the left, that Paris was just revenge against Western imperialism. ISIS aims to become the biggest imperialist of all, re-creating the ancient Islamic empire from Portugal to China. The Ottoman caliphate once came close to conquering the whole of Europe, and ISIS would like to finish the job. It claims a divine right to kill those who come in the way — Arabs, Jews, Americans, Europeans, Indians or anyone else.

UP home minister Azam Khan outraged many by making excuses for the Paris killings. He said this was a reaction to the actions of global superpowers like America and Russia. “History will decide who is the terrorist. Killing innocents whether in Syria or Paris is a highly deplorable act… But if you created such a situation, you have to face the backlash too.”

This determination to justify the attack, while grudgingly condemning it, is hypocritical communalism. It has parallels with the grudging criticism by BJP leaders of the lynching of the Dadri Muslim accused of eating beef. Tarun Vijay wrote that the lynching would indeed be terrible if it turned out that he had only eaten mutton. Culture minister Mahesh Sharma claims it was just “an accident.” Former MLA Nawab Singh Nagar said those who dared hurt the feelings of the dominant Thakurs should realize the consequences, and claimed that the murderous mob consisted of “innocent children” below 15 years of age. Srichand Sharma said violence was inevitable if Muslims disrespected Hindu sentiments.

The inability of these BJP leaders to condemn the lynching outright is matched by Azam Khan’s inability to condemn the Paris attackers outright. Communalists cherry-pick events from history to claim they are victims, with the right to vengeful retribution. Sorry, but groups across the world have been both attackers and victims. Through history, imperial conquest, killing and loot was considered great (hence Alexander the Great, or Peter the Great). Modern notions of civil rights, secularism and nationhood did not exist. Might was right, indeed greatness.

And so there were Muslims who conquered and plundered, and other Muslims who were at the receiving end. Christian conquerors created large empires by the sword, and were in turn subjugated by others. Hindu, Chinese, Mongol, Arab and African kings killed and looted for personal aggrandizement, and in turn were killed and looted.

Communalists harp on events in which they were victims, ignoring others where they were victimizers. ISIS and Azam Khan repeat the victimhood theme of Muslims in the 20th century, complaining of being bombed and dominated by the West, and claiming that revenge is both justifiable and inevitable. They are unable to see themselves also as victimizers who slaughtered and looted for centuries, from Portugal to China. Nor will they accept that victims from Portugal to China have a right to revenge.

Right message: Last week’s fatwa against ISIS signed by 1,070 Indian imams and muftis deserved more coverage

A sane, safe society is not possible if every community wants to avenge events of the past. Every community needs to accept that it has been both a victimizer and victim, and leave the past behind. Some communities have succeeded in doing this — notably Germany after World War II — and that has been the basis for civilized progress. The contrast with ISIS could not be greater.

While the media has rightly focused on Azam Khan, they have ignored the much saner response of moderate Muslims. It’s wrong to constantly highlight communal Muslims and downplay nationalist ones.

TOI last Wednesday reported “the biggest fatwa ever” against ISIS, signed by 1,070 Indian imams and muftis. The fatwa, which condemned ISIS categorically as “inhuman” and “un-lslamic”, has been forwarded by Abdur Rahman Anjaria of the Islamic Defence Cybercell to the UN, several foreign governments and the Prime Minister’s Office. Anjaria says the fatwa is the biggest ever initiative by Indian ulema to reject the dangerous ideology of ISIS, which “has disgraced the name of Allah and the Prophet….It is the duty of every Muslim to join the fight to defeat it.”

I think this news should have been on page one in every newspaper. Instead it was hidden in the inside pages of the Times of India. So was another small report on a protest meeting in Delhi by the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, to condemn the strikes in Paris, Turkey and Lebanon in the name of Islam. Without naming Azam Khan, its general secretary, Maulana Madani, said “We completely dismiss the action-reaction theory propounded by some persons.”

Prime Minister Modi needs to highlight and cite such moderate views. It’s not enough to say India needs social harmony. It’s also necessary to give kudos to those who promote that moderation.

Where Cruelty Is Kindness

Those who promoted laissez-faire economics required an explanation when the magic of the markets failed to deliver their promised utopia. Malthus gave them the answer they needed.

GEORGE MONBIOT in Outlook India

Kindness is cruelty; cruelty is kindness: this is the core belief of compassionate conservatism. If the state makes excessive provision for the poor, it traps them in a culture of dependency, destroying their self-respect, locking them into unemployment. Cuts and coercion are a moral duty, to be pursued with the holy fervour of Inquisitors overseeing an auto da fé.

This belief persists despite reams of countervailing evidence, showing that severity does nothing to cure the structural causes of unemployment. In Britain it is used to justify a £12 billion reduction of a social security system already so harsh that it drives some recipients to suicide. The belief arises from a deep and dearly-held fallacy, that has persisted for over 200 years.

Poverty was once widely understood as a social condition: it described the fate of those who did not possess property. England's Old Poor Law, introduced in 1597 and 1601, had its own cruelties, some of which were extreme. But as the US academics Fred Block and Margaret Somers explain in their fascinating book The Power of Market Fundamentalism, those who implemented it seemed to recognise that occasional unemployment was an intrinsic feature of working life.

But in 1786, as economic crises threw rising numbers onto the mercy of their parishes, the clergyman Joseph Townsend sought to recast poverty as a moral or even biological condition. "The poor know little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action — pride, honour, and ambition", he argued in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws. "In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them onto labour; yet our laws have said, they shall never hunger."

Thomas Malthus expands on this theme in his Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798. Poor relief, he maintained, causes poverty. It destroys the work ethic, reducing productivity. It also creates an incentive to reproduce, as payments rise with every family member. The higher the population, the hungrier the poor became: kindness resulted in cruelty.

Poverty, he argued, should be tackled through shame ("dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful") and the withdrawal of assistance from all able-bodied workers. Nature should be allowed to take its course: if people were left to starve to death, the balance between population and food supply would be restored. Malthus ignored the means by which people limit their reproduction or increase their food supply, characterising the poor, in effect, as unthinking beasts.

His argument was highly controversial, but support grew rapidly among the propertied classes. In 1832, the franchise was extended to include more property owners: in other words, those who paid the poor rate. The poor, of course, were not entitled to vote. In the same year, the government launched a Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws.

Like Malthus, the commissioners blamed the problems of the rural poor not on structural factors but on immorality, improvidence and low productivity, all caused by the system of poor relief, which had "educated a new generation in idleness, ignorance and dishonesty". It called for the abolition of "outdoor relief" for able-bodied people. Help should be offered only in circumstances so shameful, degrading and punitive that anyone would seek to avoid them: namely the workhouse. The government responded with the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which instituted, for the sake of the poor, a regime of the utmost cruelty. Destitute families were broken up and, in effect, imprisoned.

The commission was a fraud. It began with fixed conclusions and sought evidence to support them. Its interviews were conducted with like-minded members of the propertied classes, who were helped towards the right replies with leading questions. Anecdote took the place of data.

In reality, poverty in the countryside had risen as a result of structural forces over which the poor had no control. After the Napoleonic wars, the price of wheat slumped, triggering the collapse of rural banks and a severe credit crunch. Swayed by the arguments of David Ricardo, the government re-established the gold standard, that locked in austerity and aggravated hardship, much as George Osborne's legal enforcement of a permanent budget surplus will do. Threshing machines reduced the need for labour in the autumn and winter, when employment was most precarious. Cottage industries were undercut by urban factories, while enclosure prevented the poor from producing their own food.

Far from undermining employment, poor relief sustained rural workers during the winter months, ensuring that they remained available for hire when they were needed by farms in the spring and summer. By contrast to the loss of agricultural productivity that Malthus predicted and the commission reported, between 1790 and 1834 wheat production more than doubled.

As Block and Somers point out, the rise in unemployment and extreme poverty in the 1820s and 1830s represented the first great failure of Ricardian, laissez-faire economics. But Malthus's doctrines allowed this failure to be imputed to something quite different: the turpitude of the poor. Macroeconomic policy mistakes were blamed on the victims. Does that sound familiar?

This helps to explain the persistence of the fallacy. Those who promoted laissez-faire economics required an explanation when the magic of the markets failed to deliver their promised utopia. Malthus gave them the answer they needed.

And still does. People are poor and unemployed, George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith claimed in this week's Sunday Times, because of "the damaging culture of welfare dependency". Earlier this month, Duncan Smith, in a burst of Malthusiasm, sought to restrict child benefit to two children per family, to discourage the poor from reproducing. A new analysis by the Wellcome Trust suggests that the government, which is about to place 350 psychologists in job centres, now treats unemployment as a mental health disorder.

The media's campaign of vilification associates social security with disgrace, and proposes even more humiliation, exhortation, intrusion, bullying and sanctions. This Thursday, the new household income figures are likely to show a sharp rise in child poverty, after sustained reductions under the Labour government. Doubtless the poor will be blamed for improvidence and feckless procreation, and urged to overcome their moral failings through aspiration.

For 230 years, this convenient myth has resisted all falsification. Expect that to persist.

Sport is a vicious monster we make

First the win, then the spleen: Bob Willis vents at the end of the Headingley Test in 1981© Getty Images


The games we follow are brutal, unforgiving and unjust, but we wouldn't have them any other way

SIMON BARNES in Cricinfo| APRIL 2015

Sporting events are put together with a number of things in mind. The idea is, (1) to make as much money as possible, (2) to provide as much entertainment as possible, (3) to provide an opportunity for the best possible sport. Very much in that order.

The best ways to do this, also in order, are: (1) make huge demands on the athletes, (2) make even bigger demands on the athletes, and (3) make near-impossible demands on the athletes. That, after all, is what they're for. It's hardly surprising, then, that at the end of every competition, most athletes seem a bit mad.

Some are light-headed with euphoria, others are speechless with relief. Some are in a post-coital haze, others are at the compulsive-talking stage. Some love the whole world, some - even the victors - hate everyone, starting with their own team-mates. Some want someone to hug, some want someone to punch.

Steve Redgrave, winning his fifth gold medal in his fifth Olympic Games, chose the occasion for a bitter jibe at the press - and we responded by applauding him in heartfelt admiration. Bob Willis celebrated one of the all-time greatest displays of fast bowling at Headingley in 1981 with a prolonged rant at that convenient target, the press, while Sebastian Coe responded to his gold medal in the 1500 metres at Los Angeles in 1984 by shouting abuse at the great massed banks of press seats in the Olympic Stadium.

Matthew Pinsent wept uncontrollably after winning his fourth gold medal at rowing; Fu Mingxia took each of her diving gold medals with an air of complete calm; Usain Bolt looked mildly gratified that the world had cottoned on to to his greatness. It's all in the way these things take you, but it's seldom straightforward.

That's because the demands we make on our athletes are extreme in every possible way. That's what sport means. The winners of the cricket World Cup were required to play nine matches in six weeks, all in the public glare, and had to win the last three of them.

The more it costs the athletes, the greater the entertainment. We want nerves to be shredded. We long for truly exceptional performances, and accept that all great victories are built on the disappointment of others. "It is not enough to succeed," said the writer Gore Vidal. "Others must fail."

In sport that statement is not funny. It's an accurate summary of the way sport works. We must put our winners through the hell of nearly losing if we are to be truly satisfied: and put the losers through the hell of thinking they were about to win, before dashing their hopes to the ground.

Thus the England cricket team went to Australia in 2013 having won the last three Ashes series and strongly fancying themselves to do so again. They were beaten 5-0 and are still suffering from the traumas they endured.

Or take the Brazil football team, seemingly inevitable winners of the 2014 World Cup. They were the story of the tournament, and yet they lost 7-1 in the semi-finals to Germany, the eventual winners. This was a humiliation: a misery that you wouldn't wish on anybody.

And yet sport works by setting up opportunities for such misery. That is what brings people in: for reasons of partisanship, in search of drama, and also in search of genuine sporting excellence. None of these things can be done satisfactorily without putting the performers to an extreme test.

And some mourn: David Luiz and Thiago Silva after Brazil's horrific loss to Germany in the 2014 World Cup © AFP

You test rather more than their physical skills. You also test the temperament, from the glossy surface down to the abyssal depths. Thus we had the extraordinary, ridiculous, hilarious and horribly cruel events of the semi-final of the World Cup of 1999.

Yes, the one when, with scores level against Australia, Lance Klusener of South Africa called for a mad single and Allan Donald at the other end forgot to run - and then dropped his bat as he tried to make up for this lapse. He was run out: South Africa were defeated in horrific circumstances. It remains a classic example of minds twisted and broken by sport.

Sport was designed as a pleasure: as a way humans could get together and test themselves in various forms of competition and mock combat. But like sex, everything in sport changes the instant people watch and when people are paid for doing it.

Sport is a triviality made serious. It was at first an opportunity in which a participant could test and savour his own courage in a comparatively safe and non-threatening way. But because of the demands of the audience - that's you and me, by the way - it has become an industry based on the breaking of human beings.

Sport is an opportunity to display bravery in public: a courage-op; and we who look on find it compelling and frequently edifying. I remember watching a super-heavyweight weightlifter set a new world record, and then Andrei Chemerkin of Russia, lifting last, had the weights increased to a level beyond even that. Then he showed the glorious strength and courage to lift it. This was at the Atlanta Olympic Games of 1996 and the entire hall was roaring in empathy with his giant effort.

It is absurd, perhaps even unfair, to ask such prodigious things of sporting performers, and yet we do it on a daily basis. We make still greater demands when it comes to the biggest tests of all. Always we are looking for ways to make life still harder for the athletes.

Anyone can catch a cricket ball. But when you're told that catching a cricket ball will earn you a million bucks, you might find it a little harder - even though you are twice as eager to catch it. Of course, some people find that extra difficulty an inspiration: and that's the sort of thing we are looking for when we set these extraordinary tests for our athletes.

It's like walking along a kerbstone. Most of us can manage to do this when the drop to the gutter is two or three inches. It would be a different matter if the drop was 3000 feet.

Reality television shows are all about trying to torment people: to make them cry on television, to make them crack up in public. Call it Masterchef Syndrome. Well, it may be cruel, but the participants choose to be there. If you don't like the heat the solution is in your hands.

But the greatest reality TV ever devised is sport. Sport brings us Garry Sobers hitting six sixes in an over; and for every such wonder, there's always a Malcolm Nash at the other end, the poor bowler who will always be remembered for that, rather than for his worthy career in cricket with nearly 1000 first-class wickets.

Hardly surprising, then, that there is always something a little odd about great performers in sport. They live in circumstances cruelly devised to test them to their limits. Those who achieve genuine greatness are never satisfied by victory, and are only ever inspired by humiliation. They must have no compunction whatsoever about inflicting humiliation on someone else.

In sport we search for drama and misery © AFP

Sometimes they are asked to do one extraordinary thing on one very special day: like a World Cup final, like competing at the Olympic Games. Sometimes they are asked to do the same thing again and again, day after day, for weeks, even years, on end.

The best of these are asked to produce both kinds of courage: the enduring kind and the kind that responds to the greatest of tests. Yet we are surprised, and sometimes contemptuous, when these people fail, or show themselves wanting in certain areas.

Thus the England cricket team fell apart. It seemed that the only thing that unified them was their hatred of Kevin Pietersen. So they got rid of him and found that they couldn't cope without him either. Sport tears people apart and it does so because it's supposed to.

Some teams find inspiration in the most difficult circumstances, as Imran Khan's cornered tigers did when Pakistan won the 1992 World Cup in Australia. Sometimes circumstances find the most unlikely of heroes: who would have tipped Roger Binny to be the hero at the World Cup in 1983?

The fact is that sport is vicious, vindictive and unfair. And if it wasn't, it wouldn't be any fun. Thus at the end of any great event there are always casualties, and often enough, the casualty is celebrating victory. Often the greatest success is the undoing of the person who achieves it.

Sport feeds on its victims: gourmandises on them. There's a passage in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, in which the narrator has to consider publishing a vicious review of a new book. "So far as I was concerned the juggernaut of critical opinion must be allowed to take its irrefragable course. If too fervent worshippers… were crushed to death beneath the pitiless wheels of its car, nothing could be done. Only their own adoration of the idol made them so vulnerable."

Sport is about exactly the same process.

Top Australian surgeon advises female doctors to allow sexual harassment to get ahead

Lucy Clarke-Billings in The Independent

A senior surgeon has triggered controversy after telling junior female doctors to go along with sexual abuse at work for the sake of their careers. 

Australian vascular surgeon Dr Gabrielle McMullin drew criticism for comments made at the launch of her book - Pathways to Gender Equality.

Speaking in an ABC radio interview after the event, she said she encouraged women in her field to protect their climb up the professional ladder by “complying with requests” for sex.

The Sydney-based surgeon said sexism is so rife among her colleagues, young women should probably just accept unwanted sexual advances because speaking out would tarnish their reputations.

Dr McMullin, who studied medicine in Dublin, Ireland, said she stands by the comments she made on Friday but that her advice was “irony”.

"What I tell my trainees is that, if you are approached for sex, probably the safest thing to do in terms of your career is to comply with the request," she said after the launch.

Her shocking comments triggered angry reactions from sex abuse and domestic violence campaigners, who claimed her remarks were “appalling” and “irresponsible”.

Dr McMullin told ABC's AM program the story of Dr Caroline Tan, a young doctor who won a sexual harassment case in 2008 against a surgeon who forced himself on her while she was training at a Melbourne Hospital.

Dr Tan didn't tell anyone what had happened until the surgeon started giving her reports that were so bad they threatened the career she had worked so hard for.

But McMullin warns complaining to the supervising body is the 'worst thing' trainees could do.

“Despite that victory, she has never been appointed to a public position in a hospital in Australasia,” she said. “Her career was ruined by this one guy asking for sex on this night.

“And realistically, she would have been much better to have given him a blow-job on that night.”

Dr McMullin's comments have been roundly criticised by others in the medical profession and in women’s rights groups. 

But she said many people had thanked her for speaking out and some had come forward with more appalling stories of their experiences.

She said her critics had misunderstood her stance.

"Of course I don't condone any form of sexual harassment and the advice that I gave to potential surgical trainees was irony, but unfortunately that is the truth at the moment, that women do not get supported if they make a complaint," she told the ABC.

"And that's where the problem is, so what I'm suggesting is that we need a solution for that problem not to condone that behaviour.

"It's not dealt with properly, women still feel that their careers are compromised if they complain, just like rape victims are victimised if they complain," she said.

One victim, who did not want to be identified for fear of losing her job, told the ABC she experienced years of sexual harassment from a senior surgeon.

The victim said if she revealed her identify, she would not be considered a safe person to work with.

"If you complain... you'll be exposed, you'll be hung up to dry, you won't be able to work," she said.

"You'd be seen as a liability, that's my opinion. You absolutely would be seen as a liability moving forward.

"It's well and good that the legislation and laws say x, y and z but that wouldn't happen in practise. It would be unlikely to."

Kate Drummond, chair of the Women in Surgery committee at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, disagreed with this suggestion.

"I think we have robust processes, not only through the college for the trainees but also through the workplace," she told the ABC'S The World Today's program.

"I mean, these are people who work in hospitals and there are clear workplace processes to deal with these kinds of problems.

"And so I think there are parallel processes that we would encourage people to use and also to take the support of people like those of us in the Women in Surgery committee and we're very happy to strongly support these people."

Ms Drummond said there had been less than one complaint per year to the Women in Surgery committee regarding sexual harassment.

On Pakistan - The real war is the war of narrative

Farrukh Khan Pitafi in The Dawn

 

The terrorist narrative of victimhood, denial and conspiracy theories can easily be deconstructed and dismantled.—Photo by Zahir Shah Sherazi

The closer you want to get to eradicating the menace of terrorism, the bigger this menace seems to get.

For the past week, following the attack in Peshawar, our leaders, both in Khaki and Mufti, have deliberated and deliberated. But this piece is not about them and the solutions they might come up with. It is about the sociology of the mindset that either justifies or rationalises terrorism, or impedes tangible action against it.

It is about the failure of the state and the society to come up with a narrative that can defeat the terrorists.

Terrorists of all hues — Al Qaeda, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and its countless affiliates, Afghan Taliban and its affiliates like the Haqqani network, India-focused terror groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and sectarian terror groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi — use two weapons: incredible hatred towards their victims and a narrative to convince and recruit new supporters to the cause.

This narrative of victimhood, denial and conspiracy theories can easily be deconstructed and dismantled. But what with the rising anger in the country, fracturing of the society and the general iffiness of the times we live in, no one has done anything substantial about the issue despite harping on about it at great length.

It is time we change that.

Also read: Changing Titanic’s course

After 9/11, the United States knew whom to blame and the nation’s anger was projected outwards. After 7/7, the United Kingdom knew whom to blame, and the country was able to vent its anger. After Mumbai attack, India too, vented its anger on Pakistan and somehow managed to cool off.

In Pakistan, though, where the state had pandered to extremist inclinations for long, at the time of 9/11 there was a dictator in place, whose rise to fame and then power owed a lot to the Kargil debacle. When General Musharraf decided to take a U-turn in his Afghan/Taliban policy, he gave his people the wrong reasons for doing so.

Instead of telling them that extremism of all kinds is bad for the country; that it can easily turn against the country's own people and that nation states are held accountable if found guilty of exporting destabilising ideologies beyond their borders; he told the nation that had Pakistan not taken the step, it would have been bombed back to the stone age.

That was an admission not of flawed policies but merely of foreign pressure.

At the time, there was neither any parliament nor the free media we see today. Lack of proper debate turned the country’s anger inwards. Later, conspiracy theories of sorts would emerge, people living in denial would scavenge western media sources for whatever half-truths would fit into their narrative.

Today, we have a developed popular narrative which says that Islam is in danger, that Pakistan is about to break; all of this is linked to belief in the end of time.

Look through: Friday sermons

All faiths have eschatological predictions. Since each brand of 'endism' focuses on end of the universe, the predictions are found to be dire and can easily be exploited at any time of adversity. Our local religious extremists and televangelists have very effectively inserted these prophecies into the reactionary narrative. By raising doubts about some of the most well-documented historical developments and mixing it with this narrative, the terrorists have managed to win over a host of fence-sitters.

Just textbooks or more?

A oft-made point is the ideological indoctrination in school textbooks. It is said that our books preach hate and a distorted version of history which unhinges a young impressionable mind from the very beginning.

Be that as it may, such a thought is predicated on the assumption that all Pakistanis go to school and imbibe every word written in the textbooks. While there is no justification of hatred finding way into the school books, these books barely play even a secondary role.

Even if the textbook is saying a certain thing, what the teacher thinks and what the best friend thinks matters much more to the pupil than what is written in the book. A young child spends more time with friends, family and in front of television.

So while it is important that the curriculum must be reformed, let us not lose sight of the fact that the problem is of understated heart-to-heart oral tradition which transmits through culture.

As a child, for instance, I usually internalised much of what my father used to think with considerably less resistance, and when I met my friends, our individual sets of views would collide with each other, evolving into something new altogether.

The tragedy of television

The quality of our television news product is quite important here. In the 24/7 live news cycle where a talk show host and a news director are forced to operate at breakneck speed and take decisions on the fly, very little thought is given to quality or for that matter, narrative.

Then there is the matter of the presence of Taliban and terrorist apologists amongst our midst, which creates a problem because while the moderate majority is too divided and disorganised, the sympathisers of terrorists are very well organised and persistent. So, the resultant end product invariably confuses viewers instead of clearing their minds.

See: Our denial killed children in Peshawar

But that is not all. The reason why viewers watch our news channels a lot is because our entertainment industry has been underperforming for a decade. The power of a drama serial should not be underestimated. A playwright can say things which are difficult or impossible to say on news channels.

Sadly, however, while a debate is underway to curtail the appearance of sympathisers of terrorism on live news networks, the storytelling in the entertainment industry still remains with the same forces who played a critical role in indoctrination.

As a result, the teleplays on political matters are often found to be highly reactionary, irrational and riddled with conspiracy theories.

Hostage crisis at the pulpits

Prayer leaders don’t usually go to regular schools or watch television; their tradition is essentially oral. There is no doubt that religious seminaries (some of which are genuinely committed to spreading hate) play a crucial role in forming their worldview. But it is daily interaction with other religious-minded people and groups (Tableeghi Jamaat for instance), the availability of vast amounts literature and personal assumptions which consolidate their distorted perceptions.

The threads which feed their mindsets, some of which I have reproduced below, are of such a nature that every maulvi gets ensnared in the enemy’s propaganda with very little resistance. The message from the pulpit, may it be in the shape of the Friday sermon or the after-prayer dua, is essentially highly reactionary and counter-productive, to say the least.

What we need right now is a supply of religious scholars of integrity who can answer these questions with comfort and authority to reclaim the narrative in the mosques from the terrorists.

The terrorist's narrative

Here are some assumptions that play a crucial role in the terrorist and his sympathiser’s narrative:

Islam is in danger:

Muslims are scattered all over the world. Given their recent turbulent history it is claimed that Islam as a faith is on the brink of extinction and only violent jihad can save it. One look at the 1400 years of their history and you realise that the faith can take care of itself and needs no saviors.

These are end-of-time wars:

Islamic eschatology predicts the arrival of an Antichrist called Dajjal, and it is said that whoever chooses to side with him will never be forgiven. Now, years of propaganda has projected the West as that Antichrist. Ergo the fear that is easily exploited by terrorists.

Muslims all over the world, owing to the absence of timely 'ijtehad' or interpretation, have found it difficult to integrate with local cultures. After every two or three centuries, they are confronted with challenging times and start thinking this is the end of time.

A careful survey of Islamic literature shows no timeframe is originally given about the end. In expert hands, this element of doubt should be enough to debunk the terrorist’s propaganda.

Muslim ideal is a pan-Islamic Caliphate:

The current schools of thought in Islam took their final shape almost a millennium ago. As further debate could generate controversy, no one showed interest in challenging these dated interpretations. That era was the time of empires and nation states did not emerge until much later, till the treaty of Westphalia.

Hence, the last political model known to the Islamic thought is a theocratic Muslim empire called the Caliphate.

Explore: Political Islam: Theory and reality

Itself an interpretation, this model is highly outdated and inefficient. The Ottoman Empire was a big example of the inefficiency. However, terrorists and a long list of intellectual movements (like Hizbut Tahrir) that serve as bedrock for them, use this thought to recruit new volunteers.

If, however, you study the formative phase of Islam, you will notice that Islam as a faith is not averse to the idea of a nation state. That is another thought which can be expanded to counter the terrorist’s narrative.

Muslims are victims:

Terrorists exploit the all-pervasive feeling of Muslim victimhood to their advantage. It is stunning to see that this perception has lingered on in our country for this long.

Pakistan has accumulated over 50,000 dead bodies as gifts given to it by these 'saviours' of Muslims. How hard can it be to expose these people for who they really are?

Pakistani state is fighting terrorism due to foreign pressure:

I have explained this point at length at the start. The state must own this war and explicitly state that it is being waged for the nation's good, not under international pressure. It's a promising sign that the government is finally doing that. It will also be helpful if foreign countries didn’t appear to be pressuring the country to do more. Any concerns can be conveyed through the diplomatic channel; negotiating through the media should stop.

Democracy is evil and un-Islamic:

This, too, is an ugly propaganda tool. Democracy as the cultural 'other' is used to lure people in to the extremist side.

A bit more sensitisation about democracy and exploration of political thought in Islam would make it plain that democracy is not antithetical to the original teachings of Islam. What we lack is religious interpretation on the matter. It is tragic that no coherent work has been done in this regard during the past 13 years of fighting terrorism.

Terrorists are good Muslims:

Somewhere in their heads is this deep seated regimentation that at the end of the day, the terrorist's demand — imposition of Shariah — is a legitimate one, and so it's wrong to fight them.

This is one of the terrorist’s biggest weapons. Again, the havoc these terrorists have wreaked should speak for itself. But since, for a large number of people, it appears to have not done so, we need organised campaigns to educate the public of the real context and designs of the terrorist movement. It would help if religious figures of authority came forward shattered the myth of 'good terrorists'.

Foreign powers are doing it and blaming it on unsuspecting religious groups:

The proscribed terrorist organisations take responsibility and post videos as proof. All the apologists contributing to an alternative explanation can be and should be confronted in this regard. This can bear fruits.

Pakistan was conceived as a religious state hence it should cave in to the extremist pressure:

You will find this argument widely available in the society. But given that terrorists are essentially against Pakistani state, the state will also have to end its ambivalence on the issue and come up with an identity of the state which is not entirely dependent on religion. It is not that difficult to find such an interpretation.

---

These are some of the assumptions that the terrorists play with. The state’s reluctance to address them has led to the current proliferation of terrorist outfits. It has played a crucial role in the birth and growth of such organisations. Now, it cannot shut its eyes to their mutating ideology and pretend that the problem will go away. It knows their language, it can speak to them. I understand that it is not easy to control every Friday sermon and talk in every mosque and madrassah. But if the state comes up with a coherent narrative and sells it to the opinion makers, the terrorists’ narrative can easily be undone.

Read on: Happy to be wrong

Political and democratic ownership is essential because in the past lack of it has ruined the effort. The state knows how to highlight the narrative and sell it in the media and elsewhere despite resistance from the apologists.

The Age of Rage

David Mitchell 

Six years ago, as the financial crisis hit, David Mitchell began writing a weekly column for the Observer. In this extract from his new book, an anthology of his best writing, he recalls how austerity left a permanent mark on the mood of the nation

• 
• • David Mitchell
  • The Observer, Sunday 2 November 2014

David Mitchell: 'As a nation, we have lost confidence and creativity.' Photograph: Chris Floyd

When I started writing regularly for the Observer in 2008, a new world era began. It was a coincidence, I hasten to add. Despite patches of enthusiasm on Twitter and, on one occasion, a mention on Andrew Marr’s TV show, my weekly attempt at a public moan with jokes hasn’t quite ushered in a new age. It sometimes comes quite high up the “most viewed” list on Comment is Free (when people have hated it, that is – not so much when they haven’t), but in historical terms it’s no fall of Constantinople.

But, looking back now, with the tiny amount of hindsight that remaining alive for six more years generates, I’m pretty sure that 2008 marked the end of, and the beginning of, an era.

You’ve always got to have an era on the go, you see. Once one era ends, another begins automatically. In fact, the first one probably ends because the second one has begun and totally stolen its thunder. But it’s very much a “the King is dead – long live the King” kind of set-up. You’re absolutely not allowed a calm era-less interregnum of unremarkable pottering – a couple of years when the global situation is “between projects”, like an ageing celebrity who can pick and choose thanks to sky-high credibility and accumulated property equity.

With history, the moment the 20s stop roaring, the Depression starts slumping and then the Nazis start rising and then the world starts warring and then the instant, the very instant, the war ends, it’s postwar. Can you believe it? Not a millisecond that isn’t either the war or the postwar era. It’s fucking relentless (to paraphrase Herodotus) but it’s the only system we’ve got.

Of course, some era changeovers are harder to pinpoint than the end of a war. The one I’m talking about was like that. No new toothy smiling suit had been swept to office, no nationally beloved beauty had been chased to death by photographers, no building had been blown up or completed, no new technology suddenly launched or discredited, no disease gone pandemic or been cured. But, as when a Premier League football team runs on in front of an away crowd, and opposition fans reach vindictively for their 2ps, change was palpably in the air.

In fact, this change was all about money. Money may not bring you happiness but, if there’s one thing the credit crunch of 2008 showed, no money brings a hell of a lot of grief. And that’s what we were at risk of experiencing that autumn: no money. Anywhere. At all. The sudden absence of money – its collapse as a human construct.

Money isn’t really anything, after all. Humans don’t need money – we need food and shelter. Living the sophisticated life of the westerner, it appears that you need money in order to obtain food and shelter. But that’s not actually, fundamentally, true. Food and shelter come from farming and building. The fact that the products of those activities are swappable for money is just a convention. There’s nothing about the money itself that anyone actually requires.

Even when it was backed by gold or, before that, made of gold, it still didn’t have intrinsic value. No one needs gold (I know it’s in microchips but that’s a side issue – King Midas didn’t go all funny in the hope of reinvigorating the Lydian tech sector). It’s just shiny and it doesn’t rust, so it was convenient to develop the convention whereby little roundels of it were exchangeable for items of value. The subsequent convention that numbers on a computer screen were equally exchangeable for such items was even more convenient, but also even more dependent on everyone’s confidence in and adherence to the convention.

What started in the mists of early history as a useful aid to barter had become, by 2008, a vital element of the world as we knew it. So vital that many people who worked in the financial sector seemed to have completely forgotten that money, and credit, were just a convention – and had begun to believe that they were something solid: an actual, tangible, useful thing. Something invulnerable, something which undeniably exists.

Illustration by David Foldvari.

And so the piss-taking began.

And, by “piss-taking”, I mean casino banking: the buying and selling of the intrinsically worthless. The immoral exploitation of the market in denial of its fundamental purpose – which was supposed to be to facilitate trade, to bring resources to enterprise, not to pass round empty financial concepts before anyone realises that they have no actual value, just a transitory and astronomical price. A system of money-making which involves no real wealth-creation at all – nothing made, no useful service provided, nothing done which remotely conforms to the ancient and fundamental laws of “what you should get paid for”.

And by “began”, I mean “intensified”. I may be a pitifully naive financial analyst but I’m not quite a shit enough historian to think that any of this market immorality was unprecedented. Dishonest but somehow legal bucks have probably been made since a microsecond after the invention of the buck. I know none of this was new – but the scale of the activity certainly was. As was the terrifying computer-driven speed at which it was practised.

And I assume it’s obvious what I mean by “And so the”.

The result of all this, as we know, was the collapse of many financial institutions and, subsequently, economies, coupled with expensive efforts to prop others up using taxpayers’ – ie ordinary people’s – money. The climax of the crisis, for Britain at least, was a weekend in October 2008 when, had the Royal Bank of Scotland not been bailed out by the government, its cashpoints wouldn’t have been working on Monday morning. And not for the usual reasons of being smashed in and/or covered in sick because of all the stag dos we indulge in to sustain turnover in our hospitality sector. This time it would be because the bank had run out of money, and also of people to call to borrow money. That terrifying eventuality would have led to a run on other, healthier banks – and no bank in history, however prudent, has ever been able to return all of its investors’ money at once.

That was the moment when money nearly broke. It became clear that all the numbers on screens didn’t add up any more. Suddenly the value that these institutions were claiming to represent had to be found, and they didn’t have it. So we, the normal people, would have to – and I shudder at the injustice of the phrase – give it to them.

Never has the weirdness of what money really is – what a service economy is, how distant we’ve become from our basic survival needs, and yet how pervasive those needs remain – been more evident. “Why can’t we just pretend the money is still there?” we thought. “Send the number from the screen to the electricity people to increase the number on their screen and they’ll give us the power to keep the screen on, won’t they?”

Sadly, it turned out that’s what had already been happening for quite a while. The global fiscal Wile E Coyote had long since run off the edge of the cliff and had been scampering ineffectually in mid-air for some time. But now the period during which he has yet to start falling, because he still hasn’t noticed the absence of solid ground beneath him, was ending. We’d collectively looked down. We were caught in the beat of stillness, the panicked look to camera, that precedes the plummet.

Money didn’t collapse. Credit became terrifyingly scarce – institutions which a month earlier were betting billions on three-legged horses were suddenly withdrawing loans from solvent businesses – but the basic convention of currency just about held. That was probably for the best.

But the eye-watering injustice of the bailout – the disconnect between guilt and punishment – soured the national mood. We were angry. But we were also frightened. We were struck simultaneously by sudden and severe national poverty, after a decade of unthinking prosperity, and with something beyond poverty: a deep and deracinating sense that our previous wealth had been an illusion. The expensive frothy coffees of the early 2000s retrospectively turned to ashes in our mouths.

And, while the economic downturn brought on by the crisis was felt all over the world, it did not hurt everyone equally. Of course, that’s always the case, but the nature of that inequality had changed. Britain remained among the richest nations on Earth but, for the first time anyone could remember, countries like ours didn’t get off lightest. True, there were still plenty of people unimaginably less fortunate than ourselves. But now there was also the unsettling emergence of people who might be, or come to be, more fortunate.

The fast-growing economies of countries such as India, Brazil and, most unnerving of all, China, barely suffered a blip, while ours dropped off a cliff, still pointlessly clutching its Acme Giant Credit magnet. For the first time since the cold war, the west, the world’s dominant politico-economic force for 500 years, seemed fallible and fragile. The frailty of money and the financial services industry having been laid bare, we were forced to contemplate where real wealth comes from: making stuff and selling it. And, reality TV and artisanal cheese aside, more and more of that manufacturing was being done by the Chinese.

Illustration by David Foldvari.

The Blair-era dream of remaining rich and becoming richer, of driving our economy purely by providing services and dining out regularly, with maybe a bit of web design and party planning thrown in to keep us honest, was suddenly revealed as foolish. We felt at once deeply stupid and deeply resentful. We despised one another, and of course the government, for the mistakes that had been made, but were also nostalgic for the prosperous feeling we’d had while it was happening.

I realise the shine had been taken off New Labour long before 2008. That war in Iraq went down like a cup of cold piss, for a start. But I’m not sure that really upset Britain as much as we’re apt to think. The war made Britons shake their heads, but the credit crunch had us banging them against walls.

You only have to look at Blair and Brown’s relative electoral fortunes: Blair won a general election after getting the country involved in an unpopular and unsuccessful war, a war of which he remained unashamedly in favour; yet Brown lost one after a global economic downturn which he admittedly failed to avert, but for which he certainly wasn’t primarily responsible.

It turns out that it’s not the morality or otherwise of our foreign policy that predominantly affects the national mood, it’s money. We might not have thought we were money-obsessed, but then we probably don’t think we’re oxygen-obsessed. But you certainly get to thinking about it if someone takes it away.

The horrible shock of 2008, much more than any horrible shocks we allowed our military to impose abroad, changed our national personality. It’s as if Britain was a sprightly and twinkly pensioner who then, in the autumn of 2008, had a serious fall. It survived but has never been quite the same – it’s more timorous and judgmental, envious and angry. As a nation, we’ve lost confidence and creativity, and we’re readier to blame each other and slower to laugh at ourselves.

This is the glum conclusion I’ve come to from looking back over all the columns I’ve written. I didn’t think any of this when I started writing them six years ago. I was just glad things were going wrong because that makes it easier to write jokes – utopia is a living hell for satirical columnists. I probably fretted about what it would be like if there was a fiscal apocalypse and we were reduced to growing our own food – satirical columnists also have a rough ride in subsistence economies. But I only thought about it in economic terms: how bad and how long would the crisis be?

I thought about it a lot. Most people thought about it a lot. And thinking was what had precipitated the crisis in the first place. It wasn’t foolish and feverish speculative investments that caused the crash – it was thinking about those investments. It was realising they were foolish and ultimately valueless. As with Wile E, it was the realisation, not gravity, that made us plummet.

It had to happen at some point, I suppose. The realisation was inevitable, and so the plunge was too; it could have happened later and been worse. But it’s hard not to blame all that thinking, just as we blame, rather than thank, the surveyor who finds dry rot.

And having sparked the whole thing off with thinking, we couldn’t get out of the habit. “What does this crisis mean? How unfair is it? Where does this leave Britain now? Is anything certain any more?” We thought and thought and thought. We locked ourselves into the mindset of emergency. It became like Queen Victoria’s mourning: unhelpful, self-indulgent, but very difficult to argue against or snap out of.

“I hope you know there’s a lot of massive shit going down!” became the country’s perpetual Facebook status. Being cheerful or optimistic just allowed others to say you didn’t realise how bad things were – and to imply that therefore you, as one who’d got off lightly, were part of the problem, that you were on the wrong side of the casino-banker/thankless-nurse national divide.

As a result, this new era has been enormously and relentlessly recriminatory and angry. What started off as righteous fury at the investment banker community for their incompetence and amorality has spread to almost every aspect of public life. First,Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’s misjudged Radio 2 broadcast invoked a storm of rage, directed not just at them but against all broadcasters and celebrities. Then MPs were pilloried for fiddling their expenses in a way that didn’t just lead us to tweak how parliamentarians were financed, but to dispute the honesty of our entire political class. That group subsequently had its revenge on the pesky scrutinising newspapers when theillegal hacking of Milly Dowler’s mobile phone provided the opportunity to question the whole basis of a free press. Newspapers, politicians, the BBC and celebrities have all regularly been put through the mill. It’s as if the whole culture is screaming: “Everything feels all wrong!”

Illustration by David Foldvari.

How much of this is justified by current circumstances? How much of it is justified by the unsatisfactory nature of the human condition? How much is self-perpetuating and self-indulgent? When the current coalition government took office, it did so stating explicitly that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats had come together in statesmanlike response to the emergency the country was facing. This is one of the few of that administration’s assertions to be left largely unquestioned. We miserably and crossly accepted the premise that everything was deeply and unprecedentedly screwed. By then, that feeling had already dominated our contemplations for the best part of two years.

I think this pervading fury and sense of crisis has reached crisis levels. Which is ironic, if you think about it (which I don’t recommend). I reckon there actually is a good reason to be angry and deeply concerned, and that’s the pervasiveness of anger and deep concern about everything else. I think it imperative that everyone calm down. I think a loud emergency “Chill out!” alarm should screech from every rooftop till everyone relaxes. I told you thinking didn’t help.

If we could just let our angrily folded arms drop to our sides for one minute, we’d feel so much better. Most of us, anyway – to some, it would feel like failure or defeat.

I was particularly savagely slated on the Guardian website and Twitter for a column I wrote in March 2012, in which I argued against trade unionist Len McCluskey’s assertion that “The idea the world should arrive in London and have these wonderful Olympic Games as though everything is nice and rosy in the garden is unthinkable.” I reckoned that, despite the country’s problems, we weren’t undergoing a calamity sufficiently grave to call off the world’s premier sporting event, something that had previously been cancelled only during world wars. I wasn’t saying things were fine; I was saying they were less serious than in 1940.

I stand by that. However, many online commenters considered it a disgraceful underestimation of the problems facing the NHS/ retail sector/disabled/homeless/donkey sanctuaries – that any reference to our current problems in less than utterly superlative terms was a disgrace. That exemplified, for me, a pervading and angry loss of perspective.

Saying that things could be worse, and that they have been worse for the overwhelming majority of humans throughout the overwhelming majority of history, is not the same as being complacent. It is stating an undeniable fact. It is retaining a sane sense of proportion. It should be reassuring, but at the moment many people hate to hear it.

This wilful loss of perspective – this self-importance about our own times – means that we could do dangerous things. Our disdain for the bathwater is making the baby give us anxious looks. We’re thinking hard, casting around for solutions: a privatised NHS, an independent Scotland, pulling out of the EU, a mansion tax, getting rid of the licence fee, greater press regulation, more Tasers, a German water cannon. We’re not ruling anything out – except being careful we don’t destroy something precious, except resisting the urge to act hastily and in anger, except a period of tranquil reflection. We desperately need a break from this era. But you know the rules: as soon as it ends, another one will only start.